Looking across the river into Kentucky from Indiana, is like being a bonobo in one zoo enclosure looking at the enclosure next to yours' full of chimpanzees.
You should be the US’s official cultural and geographical explainer to the dozens of us foreigners that are on the internet these days. I’ve just learnt all I need to know about two places/states in one sentence. To follow the analogy perhaps you should rename the river between the two places “Congo”.